Under the guidance of Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson, the “Digital Food” team of his Creative Machines Lab has been building a fully autonomous digital personal chef. Lipson’s group has been developing 3D-printed foods since 2007. Since then, food printing has progressed to multi-ingredient prints and has been explored by researchers and a few commercial companies.

“We noted that, while printers can produce ingredients to a millimeter-precision, there is no heating method with this same degree of resolution,” said Jonathan Blutinger, a PhD in Lipson’s lab who led the project. “Cooking is essential for nutrition, flavor, and texture development in many foods, and we wondered if we could develop a method with lasers to precisely control these attributes.”

In a new study published Sept. 1, 2021, by npj Science of Food, the team explored various modalities of cooking by exposing blue light (445 nm) and infrared light (980 nm and 10.6 μm) to chicken, which they used as a model food system. They printed chicken samples (3 mm thick by ~1in² area) as a test bed and assessed a range of parameters including cooking depth, color development, moisture retention, and flavor differences between laser-cooked and stove-cooked meat. They discovered that laser-cooked meat shrinks 50% less, retains double the moisture content, and shows similar flavor development to conventionally cooked meat.

“In fact, our two blind taste-testers preferred laser-cooked meat to the conventionally cooked samples, which shows promise for this burgeoning technology,” Blutinger said.

While Lipson and Blutinger are excited about the possibilities of this new technology, whose hardware and software components are fairly low-tech, they note that there is not yet a sustainable ecosystem to support it. Lipson states that “what we still don’t have is what we call ‘Food CAD,’ sort of the Photoshop of food. We need a high level software that enables people who are not programmers or software developers to design the foods they want. And then we need a place where people can share digital recipes, like we share music.”

Still, says Blutinger, “Food is something that we all interact with and personalize on a daily basis — it seems only natural to infuse software into our cooking to make meal creation more customizable.”

Video on Robots that Cook: precision cooking with multiwavelength lasers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jct3f92rIOE&t=42s

Story Source:

Materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Original written by Holly Evarts. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Twelve newly sequenced ancient Japanese genomes show that modern day populations do indeed show the genetic signatures of early indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers and immigrant Yayoi farmers — but also add a third genetic component that is linked to the Kofun peoples, whose culture spread in Japan between the 3^rd and 7^th centuries.

Rapid cultural transformations

The Japanese archipelago has been occupied by humans for at least 38,000 years but Japan underwent rapid transformations only in the last 3,000 years, first from foraging to wet-rice farming, and then to a technologically advanced imperial state.

The previous, long-standing hypothesis suggested that mainland Japanese populations derive dual-ancestry from the indigenous Jomon hunter-gatherer-fishers, who inhabited the Japanese archipelago from around 16,000 to 3,000 years ago, and later Yayoi farmers, who migrated from the Asian continent and lived in Japan from around 900 BC to 300 AD.

But the 12 newly sequenced ancient Japanese genomes — which came from the bones of people living in pre- and post-farming periods — also identify a later influx of East Asian ancestry during the imperial Kofun period, which lasted from around 300 to 700 AD and which saw the emergence of political centralisation in Japan.

Shigeki Nakagome, Assistant Professor in Psychiatry in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Medicine, led the research, which brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Japan and Ireland. Professor Nakagome said:

“Researchers have been learning more and more about the cultures of the Jomon, Yayoi, and Kofun periods as more and more ancient artefacts show up, but before our research we knew relatively little about the genetic origins and impact of the agricultural transition and later state-formation phase.”

“We now know that the ancestors derived from each of the foraging, agrarian, and state-formation phases made a significant contribution to the formation of Japanese populations today. In short, we have an entirely new tripartite model of Japanese genomic origins — instead of the dual-ancestry model that has been held for a significant time.”

Genomic insights into key Japanese transformations

In addition to the overarching discovery, the analyses also found that the Jomon maintained a small effective population size of around 1,000 over several millennia, with a deep divergence from continental populations dated to 20,000-15,000 years ago — a period which saw Japan become more geographically insular through rising sea-levels.

The Japanese archipelago had become accessible through the Korean Peninsula at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum, some 28,000 years ago, enabling movement between. And the widening of the Korea Strait 16,000 to 17,000 years ago due to rising sea-levels may have led to the subsequent isolation of the Jomon lineage from the rest of the continent. These time frames also coincide with the oldest evidence of Jomon pottery production.

“The indigenous Jomon people had their own unique lifestyle and culture within Japan for thousands of years prior to the adoption of rice farming during the subsequent Yayoi period. Our analysis clearly finds them to be a genetically distinct population with an unusually high affinity between all sampled individuals — even those differing by thousands of years in age and excavated from sites on different islands,” explained Niall Cooke, PhD Researcher at Trinity. “These results strongly suggest a prolonged period of isolation from the rest of the continent.”

The spread of agriculture is often marked by population replacement, as documented in the Neolithic transition throughout most of Europe, with only minimal contributions from hunter-gatherer populations observed in many regions. However, the researchers found genetic evidence that the agricultural transition in prehistoric Japan involved the process of assimilation, rather than replacement, with almost equal genetic contributions from the indigenous Jomon and new immigrants associated with wet-rice farming.

Several lines of archaeological evidence support the introduction of new large settlements to Japan, most likely from the southern Korean peninsula, during the Yayoi-Kofun transition. And the analyses provide strong support for the genetic exchange involved in the appearance of new social, cultural, and political traits in this state-formation phase.

“The Japanese archipelago is an especially interesting part of the world to investigate using a time series of ancient samples given its exceptional prehistory of long-standing continuity followed by rapid cultural transformations. Our insights into the complex origins of modern-day Japanese once again shows the power of ancient genomics to uncover new information about human prehistory that could not be seen otherwise,” added Dan Bradley, Professor of Population Genetics in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, who co-led the project.

The algorithm, available online in the journal Neurology, uses data from a kind of brain scan known as amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) to gauge brain levels of the key Alzheimer’s protein amyloid beta.

In those who eventually develop Alzheimer’s dementia, amyloid silently builds up in the brain for up to two decades before the first signs of confusion and forgetfulness appear. Amyloid PET scans already are used widely in Alzheimer’s research, and this algorithm represents a new way of analyzing such scans to approximate when symptoms will arise. Using a person’s age and data from a single amyloid PET scan, the algorithm yields an estimate of how far a person has progressed toward dementia — and how much time is left before cognitive impairment sets in.

“I perform amyloid PET scans for research studies, and when I tell cognitively normal individuals about positive results, the first question is always, ‘How long do I have until I get dementia?’,” said senior author Suzanne Schindler, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology. “Until now, the answer I’d have to give was something like, ‘You have an increased risk of developing dementia in the next five years.’ But what does that mean? Individuals want to know when they are likely to develop symptoms, not just whether they are at higher risk.”

Schindler and colleagues analyzed amyloid PET scans from 236 people participating in Alzheimer’s research studies through Washington University’s Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center. The participants were an average of 67 years old at the beginning of the study. All participants underwent at least two brain scans an average of 4½ years apart. The researchers applied a widely used metric known as the standard uptake value ratio (SUVR) to the scans to estimate the amount of amyloid in each participant’s brain at each time point.

The researchers also accessed over 1,300 clinical assessments on 180 of the participants. The assessments typically were performed every one to three years. Most participants were cognitively normal at the start of data collection, so the repeated assessments allowed the researchers to pinpoint when each participant’s cognitive skills began to slip.

Schindler spent years trying to figure out how to use the data in amyloid PET scans to estimate the age at which symptoms would appear. The breakthrough came when she realized that amyloid accumulation has a tipping point and that each individual hits that tipping point at a different age. After this tipping point, amyloid accumulation follows a reliable trajectory.

“You may hit the tipping point when you’re 50; it may happen when you’re 80; it may never happen,” Schindler said. “But once you pass the tipping point, you’re going to accumulate high levels of amyloid that are likely to cause dementia. If we know how much amyloid someone has right now, we can calculate how long ago they hit the tipping point and estimate how much longer it will be until they are likely to develop symptoms.”

People in the study who reached the tipping point at younger ages took longer to develop cognitive symptoms than those who reached it later in life. Participants who hit the tipping point at age 50 typically took nearly 20 years to develop symptoms; those who hit it at age 80 took less than 10 years.

“When we look at the brains of relatively young people who have died with Alzheimer’s, they typically look pretty healthy, other than Alzheimer’s,” Schindler said. “But older people more frequently have damage to the brain from other causes, so their cognitive reserves are lower, and it takes less amyloid to cause impairment.”

The power of this new technique is that it requires just one brain scan, plus the person’s age. With that data, the model can estimate the time to symptom onset, plus or minus several years. In this study, the correlation between the expected age of symptom onset and the true age at diagnosis was better than 0.9 on a scale of 0 (no correlation) to 1 (perfect correlation).

After age, the genetic variant APOE4 is the strongest risk factor for Alzheimer’s dementia. People who carry one copy of the variant are two to three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s dementia than the general population, and people who carry two copies are 10 times more likely. In this study, people with the high-risk variant hit the tipping point younger, but once that point was passed, they followed the same trajectory as everyone else.

“APOE4 seems to have a seeding effect,” Schindler said. “At very low levels, below the tipping point, you see amyloid rising in people with APOE4 while it’s not changing in people without APOE4. That means APOE4 carriers are going to hit the tipping point sooner. People with two copies of APOE4 hit the tipping point about 10 years earlier than people with no copies. But after that point, we see no difference between the APOE4 carriers and noncarriers.”

At an out-of-pocket cost of about $6,000, amyloid PET brain scans are too expensive for routine clinical use. However, this algorithm could help accelerate the pace of drug development by streamlining clinical trials.

“Most participants in clinical trials designed to prevent or slow Alzheimer’s symptoms do not develop symptoms during the trials,” Schindler said. “That’s a lot of time and effort — for the participants as well as the researchers — that doesn’t yield useful data. If we could do trials only on people who are likely to develop symptoms in the next few years, that would make the process of finding therapies much more efficient.”

Now, a new technique for measuring turbulent flows has been developed by an international collaboration of scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) in Japan, along with the University of Genova, Italy, KTH Stockholm, Sweden and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. By using fibers rather than particles — the usual method of measurement — the researchers could get a more detailed picture of turbulent flows. Their method was reported on 17th September in the journal, Physical Review X.

“Turbulence is a very unique and complicated phenomena, it’s even been called the last unsolved problem in classical physics,” said Dr. Stefano Olivieri, a postdoctoral researcher from the Complex Fluids and Flows Unit at OIST, who was an author of the study. “It’s difficult to predict, difficult to simulate, and difficult to measure.”

Measuring turbulent flows is a pressing challenge for physicists for numerous reasons. Not only is turbulence characterized by its chaotic and random nature, but it also occurs across many scales at once. In turbulent flows, the swirling vortices of fluid break down into eddies that are smaller and smaller in scale, until eventually the eddies are so small and viscous that the kinetic energy of the fluid is transferred to the environment as heat.

Currently, the most common way to measure turbulent flows is by tracking the movement of particles, called tracers, that are added to the fluid. These particles are tiny and of similar density to the fluid, and so move at the same speed and in the same direction as the flow.

But in order to observe how each swirl of fluid is moving, looking at how one particle moves isn’t enough. Physicists need to be able to determine how two particles that are a specific distance apart move in relation to each other. The smaller the eddy, the closer together the two particles need to be to characterize the motion of the vortex.

To make matters more challenging, one of the defining features of turbulence is its diffusivity — a turbulent flow will spread apart over time, and so too will the tracers, especially in open flows, like an ocean current. In many cases, tracers can quickly spread too far apart to measure how the eddies are behaving.

“Every tracer particle is moving independently of each other, so you need lots of tracer particles in order to find ones that are the right distance apart,” explained Professor Marco Rosti, who leads the OIST Complex Fluids and Flows Unit.

“And too many tracer particles can actually disrupt the flow,” he added.

To circumvent this issue, the research team developed an innovative and easy solution to the problem: using fibers instead of tracer particles.

The researchers created a computer simulation where fibers of different lengths were added to a turbulent flow. These fibers were rigid, which kept the ends of each fiber a fixed distance apart. By tracking how each fiber moved and rotated within the fluid over time, the researchers were able to build up a picture that encompassed the full scale and structure of the turbulent flow.

“By using rigid fibers, we can measure the difference in the speed and the direction of the flow at two points a fixed distance apart, and we can see how these differences change depending on the scale of the eddy. The shortest fibers also allowed us to accurately measure the rate at which the kinetic energy of the fluid is transferred from the largest to the smallest scales, where it is then dissipated by heat. This value, called the energy dissipation rate, is a crucial quantity in the characterization of turbulent flows,” said Prof. Rosti.

The researchers also performed the same experiment in the laboratory. They manufactured two different fibers, one made from nylon and the other from a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane. The team tested both these fibers by adding them to water tank containing turbulent water and found that the fibers gave similar results to the simulation.

However, using rigid fibers comes with one important caveat, the scientists emphasized, as the overall movement of the fiber ends is restricted.

“Due to the fiber rigidity, the fiber ends can’t move towards each other, even if that’s the direction of the flow. That means that a fiber cannot fully represent the movement of the flow in the same way that tracer particles can,” explained Dr. Olivieri. “So before we even began simulations or lab experiments, we first needed to develop a suitable theory that took these limitations of movement into account. This was perhaps the most challenging part of the project.”

The researchers also measured the same turbulent flow in the laboratory the conventional way, by adding a high concentration of tracer particles to the water tank. The results obtained from the two different methods were similar, verifying that the fiber method and the newly developed theory gave accurate information.

Moving forward, the researchers hope to expand their method to incorporate flexible fibers that have less restriction on how they move. They also plan to develop a theory that can help measure turbulence in more complex non-Newtonian fluids that behave differently from water or air.

“This new technique has a lot of exciting potential, especially for scientists studying turbulence in large, open flows like ocean currents,” said Prof. Rosti. “And being able to easily measure quantities that were previously difficult to obtain moves us one step closer to fully understanding turbulence.”

In new research published in Nature Communications, co-authors Andrew J. Conith, postdoctoral researcher in the UMass Amherst biology department, and Craig Albertson, professor of biology at UMass Amherst, focus on the jaws of cichlids — which are notable because they have two sets of them.

“Remember the movie ‘Alien,'” asks Conith, “when the alien is about to eat Sigourney Weaver’s character? It opens its mouth and out comes a second set of jaws. Fast forward twenty years, and here I am, studying animals that have jaws in their throats.”

Cichlids, thankfully, don’t eat humans, but, thanks to their twin pairs of jaws, they are a phenomenally successful group of fishes from an evolutionary standpoint. In Lake Malawi alone, more than 1,000 different species of cichlids have evolved over the last 1 to 2 million years. One set of jaws, the oral jaw, is similar to our own, and its role is to capture food. But cichlids, like the Xenomorph from ‘Alien,’ have a second set of jaws, deeper in their throats, that’s made to process food once it has been captured by the first set. Having two pairs of jaws means that each jaw can specialize in a specific role, a feature that should increase their feeding efficiency and make them more evolutionarily successful.

Given the success of cichlids, understanding the evolution of these two jaws has become an important line of inquiry for biologists. “We’re trying to gain a better understanding of the origins and maintenance of biodiversity,” says Albertson. Researchers have long thought that the two sets of jaws are evolutionarily decoupled and can evolve independently of one another, pushing the boundaries of morphological evolution. However, Conith and Albertson demonstrated that such decoupling does not appear to be the case for cichlids, challenging a quarter-century-old assumption. “What we’ve found is not just that the evolution of the two sets of jaws is linked, but that they’re linked across multiple levels, from genetic to evolutionary,” says Albertson

These findings are a significant step forward in better understanding how evolution works. For instance, many models of evolution theorize both that organisms are constructed from repeated units — digits on your hand or teeth in your mouth — and that these individual units evolve independently from one another. “It is this ‘modularity’ of organisms that is thought to facilitate the evolutionary process,” Albertson notes.

Linked systems are usually thought to lack evolutionary potential. “They just cannot evolve in as many dimensions,” Conith says. This is referred to as an evolutionary constraint, and it plays an important role in shaping biodiversity. Constraints determine what body structures are possible.

Remarkably, this constraint seems to be the key to cichlid’s success by promoting rapid shifts in jaw shapes and feeding ecology, all of which is likely to be an advantage in a dynamic and fluctuating environment, like the East African Rift Valley, where Lake Malawi is located. “The constraint is actually facilitating cichlid evolution, rather than impeding it,” says Conith.

“This tells us that we need to rethink the fundamentals of evolutionary mechanisms,” says Albertson. “Perhaps constraints play a wider role in the evolutionary success of species around the world.”

Five peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature highlight the opportunities to leverage the vast diversity of aquatic, or “blue,” foods in the coming decades to address malnutrition, lower the environmental footprint of the food system, and provide livelihoods.

“People are trying to make more informed choices about the food they eat, in particular the environmental footprint of their food,” said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, who with colleagues examined the environmental sustainability of aquatic foods, the potential for the growth of small-scale producers and the climate risks that face aquatic food systems. “For the first time we pulled together data from hundreds of studies on a wide range of seafood species to help answer that question. Blue foods stack up really well overall and provide a great option for sustainable food.”

The research projects that global demand for blue foods will roughly double by 2050, and will be met primarily through increased aquaculture production rather than by capture fisheries.

Investing in innovation and improving fisheries management could increase consumption even more and have profound effects on malnutrition. For instance, a “high growth” modeling scenario showed that increasing supply by 15.5 million tons (8%), causing a drop in prices, would reduce cases of nutrient deficiencies by 166 million, especially among low-income populations.

“Small-scale fishers — the individuals and small boats that fish in places all around the world — are a huge part of the global seafood system and are incredibly diverse in who they are and how they fish,” said Halpern, who also directs the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis at UCSB. “That diversity creates both opportunities and challenges for sustainably managing the oceans. We unpacked this diversity to help guide better management.”

Blue foods were found to rank more highly than terrestrial animal-source foods in terms of their nutritional benefits and potential for sustainability gains.

Many blue food species are rich in important nutrients. Compared to chicken, trout has approximately 19 times more omega-3 fatty acids; oysters and mussels have 76 times more vitamin B-12 and five times more iron; and carps have nine times more calcium.

“For the first time we got to see what more aquatic food production would mean for human health globally,” said Bren School marine ecologist and assistant researcher Christopher Free, who with fellow UCSB marine scientist Jacob Eurich co-authored a study that examines the nutritional potential of blue foods. “What we project is that by making aquatic foods cheaper to the consumer, there’s likely going to be a shift away from land-based foods like chicken, beef and dairy. I think what made us really excited is knowing that aquatic food could be a useful solution to combating malnutrition, and really showing that comprehensively for the first time.”

The nutritional benefits of blue foods are especially important for women, who were found to benefit more than men from increased consumption in nearly three times the number of countries studied.

On average, the major species produced in aquaculture, such as tilapia, salmon, catfish and carp, were found to have environmental footprints comparable to chicken, the lowest-impact terrestrial meat. Small pelagic species like sardines and anchovies, bivalves and seaweeds all already offer lower stressors than chicken.

Further investments to improve the sector’s efficiency and reduce its environmental footprint can have sector-wide benefits, including for less commonly raised species like European bass, weakfish, flatfish, sea breams and milkfish.

The research found that blue food systems facing the highest risk from climate change are also typically located in those regions where people rely on them most and where they are least equipped to respond and adapt to climate hazards.

“Climate change is creating all sorts of risks to humanity, including to our food,” Halpern said. “Blue foods are no different and in fact face some unique risks from things like acidifying and warming waters. But not all foods are equally vulnerable to these risks — in our work we show where, how and why different blue foods face different risks from climate change.”

These five papers are the first in a series produced by the Blue Food Assessment (BFA), a group of more than 100 leading researchers led by Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions & Center on Food Security and the Environment, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and EAT.

“Blue foods are much more diverse than typically thought, and so too are the many communities of small-scale fishers who are often overlooked despite providing the majority of blue food people eat,” said Beatrice Crona, co-chair of the BFA and deputy science director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

“Few, if any, countries are developing their blue food sector to provide ecological, economic, and health benefits to its full potential,” said Rosamond Naylor, BFA co-chair and founding director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. “This assessment aims to provide the scientific foundation for decision-makers to evaluate trade-offs and implement solutions that will make blue foods an instrumental part of an improved food system from local to global scales.”

“The BFA assessment emphasizes the enormous diversity of blue foods, all of which carry important nutritional, cultural, economic and environmental value,” said Fabrice DeClerck, EAT science director. “To realize its potential, policymakers should put in place better governance, including participation of small producers, women and other marginalized groups, better stewardship of the natural resources on which blue foods rely; and investment in building resilience to climate change.”

“We are nine fishing seasons away from the deadline for achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals so the urgency is high,” said Jim Leape,co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. “This research can help policymakers, companies, financiers, fishers and consumers capitalize on the immense potential of blue foods to help achieve those goals.”

More than 2,500 species or species groups of fish, shellfish, aquatic plants and algae are caught or cultivated globally for food, providing livelihoods and incomes for more than 100 million and sustenance for one billion.